Since some time I’ve noticed one of my blog wordpress plugins (Zemanta WordPress Related Posts at pc-freak.net/blog is causing a serious mysql overhead, the plugin simply created too many SQL requests to the mysql server causing each client to the blog to cause an useless overhead. I’ve done a quick search whether this Zemanta propertiery (plugin) was slow and I ended up a nice article called – Related Posts Plugins performace – measured

The article compares the most popular used plugins to show Related Posts at the end of a WordPress Posted Page:

Speed Analysis was made withusing P3 Performance Profilerwordpress plugin which is outstanding one to use for anyone who want to debug what and how efficient is a wordpress install.

Tests were performed to following Related Posts plugin which more or less are doing the same (though some have some more options than others)

The average plugin load time after the initial hit (thus after the first page load)

All values are in per cents, indicating how much of the page load time is taken by the plugins – the lower the better.

The picture clearly shows that most efficient plugin with approximate best results is Contextual Related Posts. Seing that I’ve immediately disabled Zemnta Related Posts and switched to Contextual Related Posts. Once Contextual Related posts is enabled, to configure it I just had to tune few things (I set 8 related posts to show) and enabled related posts to show in the Feed. That’s it now my machine can perform better without Zemanta stoining mySQL.
I’ve given YARPP a test too and it works quite well but it is a little bit slower than CRP.
Well that’s all folks, before switching from Zemnta don’t just trust this statistics but try it yourself.Happy testing ! 🙂